11 February 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Iran announces plans to suspend Gmail

The buzz surrounding Google's updates to Gmail has been usurped by an announcement from Iran's telecommunications agency that it will be permanently suspending the Mountain View company's email service in the nation.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Iranian government is planning to introduce a national email service for Iranian citizens, leading to the suspension of international services such as Gmail, which is popular with citizens due to its security features.

Users in Iran began experiencing trouble accessing their Gmail accounts on Wednesday afternoon, with contacts being shown as offline when that was not the case. Even Iranian users accessing their accounts from other countries experienced disruption - Iranian online activist Nikahang Kowsar, using Gmail services in Toronto, told the Wall Street Journal: "I was able to use the Google chat for about 10 minutes, but it was on and off."

A Google spokesperson stated: "We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail. We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic, and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly. Whenever we encounter blocks in our services we try to resolve them as quickly as possibly because we strongly believe that people everywhere should have the ability to communicate freely online."

An Iranian official stated that the move is aimed at boosting the development of local internet services and to build trust between the people and the government. However, internet security experts are viewing it as another attempt by the government to control Iranian cyberspace, following the revelation that the majority of support for the opposition in last year's contested election took place in social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

This move is believed to have been provoked by Google's announcement that it was working with the US National Security Agency to help deal with its recent security problems in China. According to Richard Stiennon, founder of internet security firm IT-Harvest: "Iran could view that as a significant risk to its security."

The US State Department said it could not confirm whether Iran was indeed planning to suspend Gmail, but it stated that the government's efforts to keep information from its citizens would fail.